


tiny scars (are all we have)

by sleebysloth



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Angsty bois, Gen, M/M, Scar centric, Soft Andrew Minyard, i don't know why i wrote this but it's here now, talk of scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:47:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26956813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleebysloth/pseuds/sleebysloth
Summary: Betsy would call it a coping mechanism. Neil thinks that sounds too much like he’s coping.
Relationships: Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard
Comments: 4
Kudos: 196





	tiny scars (are all we have)

**Author's Note:**

> have i been writing oneshots in order to avoid writing the second chapter of my ongoing fic?? yes absolutely take my distractions please

It’s the little ones that catch his eye, now.

The iron to his shoulder, the road rash on his side, the thick raised gash that runs from his chest to his navel, the burn on his face. Neil could spend hours tracing their outlines, movements he’s already committed to muscle memory. 

He could also spend hours tearing at them with his fingertips. 

But they are loud, and Neil has always preferred the quiet ones.

The scent of candy and cigarettes comes to mind. 

Neil welcomes it.

There’s a small raised scar just below the juncture between his finger and thumb. Neil doesn’t remember how it got there, only that its been there for as long as he can remember. He ghosts over it with his thumb and welcomes the blankness that it brings.

A discoloured patch of skin on his right knee from when he fell after being rammed by a huge backliner. It had taken longer to heal with him picking at it absently all the time, but Andrew soon put a stop to it.

(“Stop picking at it, idiot. It’ll scar.”

Neil looks up from where he’s fitting the tip of his nail under the dry irritated skin, and smiles softly up at him. 

“I don’t mind. What’s a couple more,” he says ruefully, gesturing to his ruined body. The scars look even more red and raw next to the silk hotel sheets, stark. Andrew’s face goes hard as he follows Neil’s hand. 

Hazel meets ice in a silent question. Neil nods. 

Andrew’s fingers trail down his chest, and later his tongue does the same.

Neil forgets how to breathe, then and all the times after that.)

It had still scarred, but now every time Neil spots it he thinks of certain things other than the nameless backliner. 

—

Sometimes, when Andrew has quieter-than-quiet days, Neil will sit in a chair and tell him the stories of his tiny scars. 

He never gets a reply from where Andrew stares blankly at the ceiling, but by the way his calloused fingers find them afterwards and linger too long to not be purposeful, Neil knows he listens.

—

Betsy would call it a coping mechanism. Neil thinks that sounds too much like he’s coping. 

—

It’s easy to lose himself in his reflection and sit, staring, into the eyes of the man who murdered his mother. Sometimes Neil doesn’t realise he’s looking until he does, but by then there is nothing to do but suppress the full-body shivers and stare off into space. He awakes out of his trances to fingers curling around his neck, and he doesn’t notice the tears on his cheeks until Andrew roughly wipes them away. 

He is scarred, is a scar.

But at least some of them are small, Neil thinks.

(“If you’re going to use your trauma to make a short joke right now, first of all: Fuck you.” Andrew deadpans, and Neil bites back a laugh. 

“I’m looking forward to it.” He smirks, and Andrew stays silent from where he reads his book, but he isn’t looking at the pages at all.)

—

There’s a small nick on his left earlobe that Andrew likes to bite. Neil tugs on it and feels the pressure of teeth instead of his mother’s knife.

—

Once, Andrew takes a pen and starts drawing. Foxes and rabbits and stars and suns litter Neil’s inner forearms, and a garden of flowers decorates his chest. Neil keeps reapplying them with a shaky hand when the colours start to fade until Andrew grabs his arm and starts drawing more with a grumble under his breath and concentration on his face. 

Neil doesn’t think he’s ever seen anything as beautiful as Andrew sitting crosslegged in front of him with Neil’s arm in his lap and an array of coloured markers spread out on the floor, tongue half poking out and a smudge of orange ink on his cheekbone. 

He tells him as such and Andrew rolls his eyes. Later, Neil finds a small black heart on the underside of his wrist.

—

On bad days (because no one can avoid bad days; a truth Neil has had to accept and a truth Andrew has made him accept) the little scars pale and fade into his skin like a scared animal.

On those days Neil feels disjointed. Unreal.

Andrew calls him pipe dream and Neil can’t do anything but agree as he stares unseeingly down at his hands. The apartment tilts in front of his eyes and Neil feels lost in rooms he’s lived in for almost two years. 

He takes to sitting in front of the bathroom mirror, perched on a stool and running his eyes along loud angry marks. He doesn’t see his father on those days, nor his mother. He doesn’t see anything but thick, discoloured lines. 

An abstract painting in reds and whites.

Everything is wrong on those days, but if he can’t find the little scars then he has to find the big ones instead. The world gets shaky and blurred but his parent’s hurt is carved too deep to be anything but clear. 

He looks and looks until Andrew waves a hand in his face and his image is shattered. 

When Neil says in quiet Russian that he can’t sleep, Andrew says nothing and links their pinkies together. 

They stare at the ceiling until it’s painted with gold.

—

The years go on, and Neil watches as scars come and go. He welcomes each new one, each new mark caused not from sadistic parents and mob bosses.

Little scars are born of softer things.

Neil still gets changed in private stalls, but when the Foxes all meet up he doesn’t mind showing skin, doesn’t care about the wind blowing his shirt off his collarbone as he used to. 

They’re all scarred, after all. A broken little patchwork family.

Allison shows him the faint white lines travelling down her shoulders and hips, blurry reminders of long showers and skin under acrylic nails.

Matt’s trackmarks create patterns that his 2 year old daughter traces in wonderment. Matt tells him of how he hadn’t been able to hold back tears the first time she did it. 

Renee fist bumps him, and he feels the raised skin on her knuckles. She whispers of punching walls to him when she catches his gaze.

Dan smiles, unashamed, as she plays with the rough patches of skin on her inner thighs, and so does Neil. 

Nicky’s back is striped with faint scars, and he holds his head high even as he speaks of how his father would quote bible passages before he beat his son with a belt.

Aaron has a nick in the back of his head, only noticeable when he redoes his undercut. No one asks, and he doesn’t say, but Neil has a similar one on one of his shoulder blades from when his mother shoved him into a coffee table. 

Kevin’s hand is streamlined with pale pinks and whites, and the colours contrast nicely when he holds Thea’s hand.

Wymack’s tattoos hide symmetrical lines up to his shoulders and down to his wrists. Abby stokes them sometimes, when she thinks no one sees.

Andrew doesn’t wear his armbands at night anymore, and Neil is quick to press light kisses into the skin of his forearms when he is given the ok.

They are a funny, misshapen patchwork family, but Neil loves them. Loud and quiet scars alike. 

—

Andrew’s fingertips caress the barely-there knife mark across Neil’s throat that he painted there himself 7 years ago, and Neil arches into it. 

“Fuck,” Andrew breathes, so quiet Neil isn’t sure he meant to say it out loud. “Fuck, Neil-“ 

He breaks off with a strangled noise in the back of his throat and reaches a trembling hand up to gently cup Neil’s jaw. 

“I-“

“I know, ‘drew.” Neil says. Because he does know. Knows exactly what Andrew is trying to say, what he can’t say. 

Knows it in the way Andrew takes him apart and puts him back together, in the way Andrew quirks up the corners of his mouth whenever Neil trips over one of the cats. Knows it in the way his hands clasp tight to Neil’s, comforting not constricting. Knew it since the day Andrew burst into that Baltimore hotel room and ripped the bandages off his face, and has gone on knowing it up to this very moment. Will keep on knowing it until he meets his maker.

Neil has known for a very long time.

“I know”, he says, because he does.


End file.
